Test Drive 6

Cruising along city streets in real cars should be more fun than this Game Boy racing title.

Test Drive has been around since the Amiga and Apple II days. It was one of Accolade's key franchises for the company ¿ the whole idea for the series has always been to give gamers a taste of what it's like to drive vehicles they'd normally never have the opportunity to. That is, until now. The latest version of the series from Infogrames (since Accolade was scarfed up by the company earlier this year) throws out most of the series' ideals for a more arcade-style game. Unfortunately, the game lacks the needed polish and comes off like sloppy development by a company that has never programmed on the Game Boy before.

Features

12 licensed sportscars and musclecars

24 tracks

Cop Chase mode

Battery back-up

Short cuts

For Game Boy and Game Boy Color

You can honestly see where the game could be good. The track designs are nice, the game has a bunch of racing features including Championship and an odd Cop Chase mode, and the controls are tight enough. Test Drive 6 throws out the behind-the-steering-wheel perspective and offers a half Micro Machines/half RC Pro Am isometric perspective. For the Game Boy, this design works fine ¿ Micro Machines and RC Pro Am are excellent racing titles in their own rights. But just play Test Drive 6 and you can just see how things could have been changed to make the game, well, fun to play.

First, the scrolling speed is way too slow. Even at the higher levels where you earn faster options or vehicles, the game never really gets to a pace where you feel a sense of speed. Second, the amount of frames of animation for each car is way too low ¿ when you turn left or right, the sloppy animation is painfully obvious since each incremental angle of the car jumps and jerks from one frame to the next.

The computer AI is also very annoying ¿ the three other cars pose absolutely no threat in the early cups, but then suddenly earn super human driving abilities when you manage to lead the pack in the later Tournament cups. The animation of these vehicles looks like you're playing the game on a slow PC network ¿ just watch the cars jerk around the track like you're bogged down by lag. The irony of it all is that even though it looks like it could be networked, this game doesn't even support the link cable for two players, an absolute necessity in racing games nowadays.

The game features 12 licensed cars, but there's no way these cars drive like the real-life counterpart. I'm not going to cut points for this (even though the Test Drive series was all about attention to detail in handling, speed, acceleration, etc) since there'd really be no way to keep track of realistic handling in this type of racing game.

The Verdict

You can see where the game could have been good. Had the animation been smoother, had the speed of the game been faster, and had the game supported the link cable, Test Drive 6 would have been a decent game worthy of a place in your collection. But as it is, the sloppy programming really makes it hard to recommend this title.